If you want to know why our nation is becoming more and more dysfunctional with “snowflakes” that run and hide in their “safe spaces” when someone says something disagreeable, we need to place blame squarely on the shoulders of our failed educators who indoctrinate rather than educate. An old Marxist trick of grabbing them when they are young so they accept your abnormally skewed worldview without question because that is all they know.

An example of this malevolent influence in our classrooms can be illustrated with the screed who suggests that our education system has failed because it breeds white supremacy. Not to mention decades of quasi-illiterate, dysfunctional students who lack resiliency and the ability to think for themselves.

7 Ways Teachers Can Respond to the Evil of Charlottesville, Starting Now

An educator confronts the failures of an education system that breeds white supremacy.

[OCS: Amazingly, the author does not see the falsity in this statement that confuses correlation with causation. Did our educational system fail because psychopaths and mentally deranged people managed to graduate? Teachers are not society’s arbiters, they are paid employees that should be teaching things which create functional adults. On the other hand, we can say that educators are deliberately breeding black radicals and revolutionaries with their selective teachings and continued indoctrination of their students into following a prescribed political agenda.]

White supremacy did not appear as a surprise guest to this weekend’s events. It is a plague that permeates every aspect of our shared society. At the same time as it threatens to strip people of color of their lives and freedom, it corrodes the logic, reason and future of our society as a whole. White supremacy is also a deeply embedded feature of our education system even as it runs counter to the values we claim to hold in pursuit of education.

[OCS: No the surprise guests as this weekend’s events were violent radical socialists and Marxists who wanted to create a media presence – they were the ones without a permit. And believe it or not, white people are also people of color, so get on with your bad self when you condemn what is becoming a shrinking class of people in this country. The fact that affirmative action is unconstitutional and unfairly penalizes one class of people and promotes another class of people is not often discussed, because most of these radicals do not recognize nor honor our Constitution.]

In response to this weekend’s deadly white supremacist rallies and violence in Charlottesville, there was a shared outrage among educators on social media. I saw a range of reactions. A lot of folks—especially white—asked, "How could this happen in America?” And a lot of folks—especially people of color—said, “We’ve been telling you that this is happening in America.”

[OCS: Most of productive and functional America does not live for media mentions of their agenda or spend their lives on social media. If anything, there was outrage among people because the police failed to perform their sworn duties to keep the peace and to provide safety and security to the local residents. Being told to “stand down” by a progressive city administration and not to act until a command was given.]

What many of us shared was a conviction that the events in Charlottesville couldn’t go unchallenged. In considering effective responses while looking at the sea of hateful white faces in the media of the event, I wondered: Who grew this hate? Who planted it? Who nurtured it? Who protected it from exposure to education and love? With an eye to education, I asked, What schools failed to educate these white supremacists? Who were their teachers? Who taught this hate?

[OCS: One might as the same question of the radical activists and agitators that crashed the event to make a media statement.]

As teachers, our job is not solely to pour mathematics, science, language arts or any other knowledge into the heads of our students. It is our duty to our profession, to our society and to the students to lovingly teach them to learn and grow as complete humans.

[OCS: Your job as an educator is to educate, to provide the tools to lead a successful and productive life in today’s society. It is not to countermand parental teachings nor is it to indoctrinate students into a political agenda that features weakness and lack of resiliency.]

The fact that the violent white supremacists in Charlottesville moved through dozens of classrooms that taught English, social studies, math, science and other subjects while nurturing or enhancing their white supremacist ideals is an indictment of our daily practice. It says that their institutions may have effectively served math facts or essay writing, but it was with a side of white supremacy.

[OCS: This is garbage – because the other side also moved through the same classrooms and were taught victimhood, grievance, revolution, and the necessity of supporting a particular political party to redress their grievances. Does this useful idiot believe that all of the black separatists are any different from the white separatists?]

This may seem too harsh on my colleagues at predominantly white schools. Let me be clear: first, this is not about blame. I write out of deep urgency that we address the cultural and systemic failures in our school system that are promoting white supremacy. I ask you to consider how it is that we’ve grown accustomed to narratives regarding the failings of segregated schools that serve students of color, but not the schools that educated those who defend and promote that segregation.

[OCS: When one hears educated people suggesting that science and mathematics curricula need to be adjusted because they are products of white privilege, you can understand how delusional these anti-intellectuals might be. When one wants to erase history and make it about victimhood, ignoring all that is good and decent about our nation, one can see how delusional these anti-intellectuals might be.]

So what do we do?

[OCS: My first thought is to competency test teachers on subject matter knowledge and teaching skills – and to remove the tenure that protects them when they produce deviant results or advocate the violent overthrow of our nation.]

As we walk into our classrooms in the coming weeks, here are a number of concrete actions every educator can take to address the evil that was on display in Charlottesville. Some of these suggestions deal with Charlottesville specifically, but most will help educators address the longer term systemic challenges in our classrooms that foster white supremacy and other oppression.

Recognize that humanity and radical anti-racism is our curriculum for every subject. We should address events like Charlottesville and especially their root causes within our classes, and not just humanities. The irony that fields like mathematics and science claim to be neutral on social issues while at the same time exhibiting demographic differences that are mathematically impossible in a neutral system should be lost on no one. From the first day of class, we must demonstrate to students that the classroom is a space to bring all challenges and dilemmas they face, and that our curriculum will support them to build the skill and power to address those needs. Resources: Rethinking Schools has materials across all fields of student and age ranges. Teaching Tolerance has materials that focus on humanities, but can be adapted for any subject. To teach responsively to events like Charlottesville, the curated hashtag #CharlottesvilleCurriculum should be helpful.

Audit our own classrooms, schools and communities and then take action. We must assess and analyze the climate in every level of our school districts. We cannot effectively teach if we are unaware of how issues of race and oppression already exist in our spaces.

For some of us, this may be difficult and expose feelings of guilt or helplessness. That is not the purpose of this work. What is, is. It’s better for us to know and understand reality than to be fearful that it might be exposed. Once we are familiar with what is happening in our classrooms, then we have the opportunity to see if it aligns with our values and make it so. Resources: We can investigate questions like the following: What is the racial breakdown of students, teachers and administrators in the school? How about the union leadership? How is discipline handled at the school, what is the racial/ability breakdown of those affected and is it from a carceral or restorative model? How do students interact in your own classroom and how does demographic impact participation and voice? Let’s examine all of these questions and more across intersectional lens of identity (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, religious background, age).

Prioritize voices of color in every classroom. In all environments including within predominantly white institutions, it’s vital that we as educators counter the priority on white male voices in education. There are many educators who read almost exclusively white (and in some cases white male) voices in their own pursuits of knowledge. Most white students will have next to zero access to authors of color outside of the school environment. This not only limits their exposure to brilliant work, but contributes to a white supremacist mindset that voices (and the lives) of people of color do not matter. Resources: We Need Diverse Books, contact experts of color on various topics to address students (compensating whenever possible).

Teach media literacy. Students must be equipped to read media for bias and develop their own understandings of news and events counter to a white supremacist narrative. The framing of black liberation groups as the equivalent to white terrorist organizations by the media is a cornerstone to the development of white supremacist movements in the U.S. Additionally, the inability to critically assessment sources both in traditional and social media aids white supremacists groups in their recruitment.Resources: Critical Media Project.

Create classrooms that students feel safe to share in, but are not conducive to the spread of hatred (we don’t get to debate each other’s humanity). Many classrooms either attempt to be “neutral” by ignoring politics for sterile content or allow open debate which usually focuses on whether the oppression or dehumanization of marginalized peoples is a good or bad thing. The former tends to softly side with the general white supremacy in American curricula, culture and assessments while the latter is not really a free exchange of ideas but rather an endorsement for students to use social inequities to bludgeon the victims of that inequity. Resources: Both the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance and GLSEN have incredible resources for developing classroom safe spaces.

Reject narratives of achievement and growth that embrace the tools and values of white supremacy. Much of our current definitions of achievement, growth and success tend to privilege culturally biased content knowledge while ignoring deep deficiencies in empathy and affinity for others. When we teach students to value a culturally biased test or we praise those who received far more resources without questioning that inequity, we are signalling to them that they deserve the visible benefits that inequities give them (or in the case of students of color, we deserve the oppression that those inequities represent). Resources: “Internalizing the Myth of Meritocracy.”

Reach beyond our current spaces to learn and grow. The fundamental segregation of our national school system means that many white students are educated in predominantly white spaces by almost exclusively white teachers. In these environments, it’s challenging for white educators to access anti-racist pedagogical resources and conversations. Resources: #Educolor.

I hope that by implementing these tactics, we can erode the scourge of white supremacy that permeates many of our classrooms, schools and communities. Education has had a history of fortifying white supremacy in our nation’s past and present, but with our work, education can be the means to eradicating it in our nation’s future.

Xian Franzinger Barrett is a part-time special education teacher who previously taught in the Chicago Public Schools. He was a 2009-2010 U.S. Department of Education Classroom Teaching Ambassador Fellow. He is a founding member of EduColor.

EduColor appears to be an organization that profits from racial division and hatred. Perhaps if they were really interested in education, they would be speaking about improving the education of all students by removing race and politics from the class room. The organization appears to be operating on the same agenda as the “poverty pimps” who exploit class to advance their Marxist agenda.

“EduColor seeks to elevate the voices of public school advocates of color on educational equity and justice. We are an inclusive cooperative of informed, inspired and motivated educators, parents, students, writers and activists who promote and embrace the centrality of substantive intersectional diversity.”

Tyranny by the minority …

What do students do when most everything they trust might be based on a lie?

It is almost as if these activists and agitators are living in an alternate universe where Blacks and others should not be held accountable for their behavior as a redress for 100+ year old grievances. Perhaps educators should promote unity and cooperation instead of balkanizing students into classes of victims to be politically exploited as useful idiots.

I find it crazy that these are the same people who never hold progressive socialist democrats who govern the inner cities responsible for the poverty, illiteracy, disease, and decay while spending billions of dollars in programs with the sole purpose of buying votes and entrenching and perpetuating their political power.

Perhaps, if teachers returned to teaching the core fundamentals of science – whoops, wouldn’t want students challenging the global climate dogma of their indoctrinators. Or perhaps civics – whoops, would want students to realize it is the corrupt politicians, not the “white class” that continues to screw them over. What do you think might happen if the real history of the Democrat involvement in racist politics were exposed?

We are so screwed when we allow this drivel to pass without comment.

-- steve

"The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane." -- Marcus Aurelius

Comments

If you want to know why our nation is becoming more and more dysfunctional with “snowflakes” that run and hide in their “safe spaces” when someone says something disagreeable, we need to place blame squarely on the shoulders of our failed educators who indoctrinate rather than educate. An old Marxist trick of grabbing them when they are young so they accept your abnormally skewed worldview without question because that is all they know.

An example of this malevolent influence in our classrooms can be illustrated with the screed who suggests that our education system has failed because it breeds white supremacy. Not to mention decades of quasi-illiterate, dysfunctional students who lack resiliency and the ability to think for themselves.

7 Ways Teachers Can Respond to the Evil of Charlottesville, Starting Now

An educator confronts the failures of an education system that breeds white supremacy.

[OCS: Amazingly, the author does not see the falsity in this statement that confuses correlation with causation. Did our educational system fail because psychopaths and mentally deranged people managed to graduate? Teachers are not society’s arbiters, they are paid employees that should be teaching things which create functional adults. On the other hand, we can say that educators are deliberately breeding black radicals and revolutionaries with their selective teachings and continued indoctrination of their students into following a prescribed political agenda.]

White supremacy did not appear as a surprise guest to this weekend’s events. It is a plague that permeates every aspect of our shared society. At the same time as it threatens to strip people of color of their lives and freedom, it corrodes the logic, reason and future of our society as a whole. White supremacy is also a deeply embedded feature of our education system even as it runs counter to the values we claim to hold in pursuit of education.

[OCS: No the surprise guests as this weekend’s events were violent radical socialists and Marxists who wanted to create a media presence – they were the ones without a permit. And believe it or not, white people are also people of color, so get on with your bad self when you condemn what is becoming a shrinking class of people in this country. The fact that affirmative action is unconstitutional and unfairly penalizes one class of people and promotes another class of people is not often discussed, because most of these radicals do not recognize nor honor our Constitution.]

In response to this weekend’s deadly white supremacist rallies and violence in Charlottesville, there was a shared outrage among educators on social media. I saw a range of reactions. A lot of folks—especially white—asked, "How could this happen in America?” And a lot of folks—especially people of color—said, “We’ve been telling you that this is happening in America.”

[OCS: Most of productive and functional America does not live for media mentions of their agenda or spend their lives on social media. If anything, there was outrage among people because the police failed to perform their sworn duties to keep the peace and to provide safety and security to the local residents. Being told to “stand down” by a progressive city administration and not to act until a command was given.]

What many of us shared was a conviction that the events in Charlottesville couldn’t go unchallenged. In considering effective responses while looking at the sea of hateful white faces in the media of the event, I wondered: Who grew this hate? Who planted it? Who nurtured it? Who protected it from exposure to education and love? With an eye to education, I asked, What schools failed to educate these white supremacists? Who were their teachers? Who taught this hate?

[OCS: One might as the same question of the radical activists and agitators that crashed the event to make a media statement.]

As teachers, our job is not solely to pour mathematics, science, language arts or any other knowledge into the heads of our students. It is our duty to our profession, to our society and to the students to lovingly teach them to learn and grow as complete humans.

[OCS: Your job as an educator is to educate, to provide the tools to lead a successful and productive life in today’s society. It is not to countermand parental teachings nor is it to indoctrinate students into a political agenda that features weakness and lack of resiliency.]

The fact that the violent white supremacists in Charlottesville moved through dozens of classrooms that taught English, social studies, math, science and other subjects while nurturing or enhancing their white supremacist ideals is an indictment of our daily practice. It says that their institutions may have effectively served math facts or essay writing, but it was with a side of white supremacy.

[OCS: This is garbage – because the other side also moved through the same classrooms and were taught victimhood, grievance, revolution, and the necessity of supporting a particular political party to redress their grievances. Does this useful idiot believe that all of the black separatists are any different from the white separatists?]

This may seem too harsh on my colleagues at predominantly white schools. Let me be clear: first, this is not about blame. I write out of deep urgency that we address the cultural and systemic failures in our school system that are promoting white supremacy. I ask you to consider how it is that we’ve grown accustomed to narratives regarding the failings of segregated schools that serve students of color, but not the schools that educated those who defend and promote that segregation.

[OCS: When one hears educated people suggesting that science and mathematics curricula need to be adjusted because they are products of white privilege, you can understand how delusional these anti-intellectuals might be. When one wants to erase history and make it about victimhood, ignoring all that is good and decent about our nation, one can see how delusional these anti-intellectuals might be.]

So what do we do?

[OCS: My first thought is to competency test teachers on subject matter knowledge and teaching skills – and to remove the tenure that protects them when they produce deviant results or advocate the violent overthrow of our nation.]

As we walk into our classrooms in the coming weeks, here are a number of concrete actions every educator can take to address the evil that was on display in Charlottesville. Some of these suggestions deal with Charlottesville specifically, but most will help educators address the longer term systemic challenges in our classrooms that foster white supremacy and other oppression.

Recognize that humanity and radical anti-racism is our curriculum for every subject. We should address events like Charlottesville and especially their root causes within our classes, and not just humanities. The irony that fields like mathematics and science claim to be neutral on social issues while at the same time exhibiting demographic differences that are mathematically impossible in a neutral system should be lost on no one. From the first day of class, we must demonstrate to students that the classroom is a space to bring all challenges and dilemmas they face, and that our curriculum will support them to build the skill and power to address those needs. Resources: Rethinking Schools has materials across all fields of student and age ranges. Teaching Tolerance has materials that focus on humanities, but can be adapted for any subject. To teach responsively to events like Charlottesville, the curated hashtag #CharlottesvilleCurriculum should be helpful.

Audit our own classrooms, schools and communities and then take action. We must assess and analyze the climate in every level of our school districts. We cannot effectively teach if we are unaware of how issues of race and oppression already exist in our spaces.

For some of us, this may be difficult and expose feelings of guilt or helplessness. That is not the purpose of this work. What is, is. It’s better for us to know and understand reality than to be fearful that it might be exposed. Once we are familiar with what is happening in our classrooms, then we have the opportunity to see if it aligns with our values and make it so. Resources: We can investigate questions like the following: What is the racial breakdown of students, teachers and administrators in the school? How about the union leadership? How is discipline handled at the school, what is the racial/ability breakdown of those affected and is it from a carceral or restorative model? How do students interact in your own classroom and how does demographic impact participation and voice? Let’s examine all of these questions and more across intersectional lens of identity (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, religious background, age).

Prioritize voices of color in every classroom. In all environments including within predominantly white institutions, it’s vital that we as educators counter the priority on white male voices in education. There are many educators who read almost exclusively white (and in some cases white male) voices in their own pursuits of knowledge. Most white students will have next to zero access to authors of color outside of the school environment. This not only limits their exposure to brilliant work, but contributes to a white supremacist mindset that voices (and the lives) of people of color do not matter. Resources: We Need Diverse Books, contact experts of color on various topics to address students (compensating whenever possible).

Teach media literacy. Students must be equipped to read media for bias and develop their own understandings of news and events counter to a white supremacist narrative. The framing of black liberation groups as the equivalent to white terrorist organizations by the media is a cornerstone to the development of white supremacist movements in the U.S. Additionally, the inability to critically assessment sources both in traditional and social media aids white supremacists groups in their recruitment.Resources: Critical Media Project.

Create classrooms that students feel safe to share in, but are not conducive to the spread of hatred (we don’t get to debate each other’s humanity). Many classrooms either attempt to be “neutral” by ignoring politics for sterile content or allow open debate which usually focuses on whether the oppression or dehumanization of marginalized peoples is a good or bad thing. The former tends to softly side with the general white supremacy in American curricula, culture and assessments while the latter is not really a free exchange of ideas but rather an endorsement for students to use social inequities to bludgeon the victims of that inequity. Resources: Both the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance and GLSEN have incredible resources for developing classroom safe spaces.

Reject narratives of achievement and growth that embrace the tools and values of white supremacy. Much of our current definitions of achievement, growth and success tend to privilege culturally biased content knowledge while ignoring deep deficiencies in empathy and affinity for others. When we teach students to value a culturally biased test or we praise those who received far more resources without questioning that inequity, we are signalling to them that they deserve the visible benefits that inequities give them (or in the case of students of color, we deserve the oppression that those inequities represent). Resources: “Internalizing the Myth of Meritocracy.”

Reach beyond our current spaces to learn and grow. The fundamental segregation of our national school system means that many white students are educated in predominantly white spaces by almost exclusively white teachers. In these environments, it’s challenging for white educators to access anti-racist pedagogical resources and conversations. Resources: #Educolor.

I hope that by implementing these tactics, we can erode the scourge of white supremacy that permeates many of our classrooms, schools and communities. Education has had a history of fortifying white supremacy in our nation’s past and present, but with our work, education can be the means to eradicating it in our nation’s future.

Xian Franzinger Barrett is a part-time special education teacher who previously taught in the Chicago Public Schools. He was a 2009-2010 U.S. Department of Education Classroom Teaching Ambassador Fellow. He is a founding member of EduColor.

EduColor appears to be an organization that profits from racial division and hatred. Perhaps if they were really interested in education, they would be speaking about improving the education of all students by removing race and politics from the class room. The organization appears to be operating on the same agenda as the “poverty pimps” who exploit class to advance their Marxist agenda.

“EduColor seeks to elevate the voices of public school advocates of color on educational equity and justice. We are an inclusive cooperative of informed, inspired and motivated educators, parents, students, writers and activists who promote and embrace the centrality of substantive intersectional diversity.”

Tyranny by the minority …

What do students do when most everything they trust might be based on a lie?

It is almost as if these activists and agitators are living in an alternate universe where Blacks and others should not be held accountable for their behavior as a redress for 100+ year old grievances. Perhaps educators should promote unity and cooperation instead of balkanizing students into classes of victims to be politically exploited as useful idiots.

I find it crazy that these are the same people who never hold progressive socialist democrats who govern the inner cities responsible for the poverty, illiteracy, disease, and decay while spending billions of dollars in programs with the sole purpose of buying votes and entrenching and perpetuating their political power.

Perhaps, if teachers returned to teaching the core fundamentals of science – whoops, wouldn’t want students challenging the global climate dogma of their indoctrinators. Or perhaps civics – whoops, would want students to realize it is the corrupt politicians, not the “white class” that continues to screw them over. What do you think might happen if the real history of the Democrat involvement in racist politics were exposed?